6.3 million now eligible to receive Medicaid

Thursday

Jan 23, 2014 at 12:01 AMJan 23, 2014 at 11:37 AM

NEW YORK - More than 6.3 million Americans were deemed eligible for government health-care plans for the poor from the Oct. 1 launch of President Barack Obama's health-care law through December, federal officials reported yesterday.

NEW YORK — More than 6.3 million Americans were deemed eligible for government health-care plans for the poor from the Oct. 1 launch of President Barack Obama’s health-care law through December, federal officials reported yesterday.

The swelling rolls for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program reflect both an expansion of Medicaid under Obama’s Affordable Care Act and what health-care policy analysts call an “out-of-the-woodwork effect,” in which people who heard about Obamacare sought to obtain health insurance and discovered that they had qualified for Medicaid even before the law expanded eligibility.

“We have people who for the first time will have some health security that they never had before,” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said of the Medicaid numbers at the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C.

It was unclear how much credit goes to the health-care law, however.

“What many people don’t read far enough to learn is that this number also can include people in some states who are eligible under pre-expansion and whose Medicaid enrollment was simply renewed,” said Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.

The 6.3 million people determined eligible for Medicaid or CHIP last fall swamps the

2.2 million people who had bought private health insurance on the state-based Obamacare marketplaces that launched on Oct. 1. The health-care law also raised the income threshold for Medicaid eligibility to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or $15,856 for a single person.

A Supreme Court decision in 2012 allowed each state to decide whether to accept the expansion. So far, 25 states have reached an agreement with the administration to do so. Before the health-care law, a bit more than 60 million Americans were covered by Medicaid.

In December alone, 2.3 million people were determined eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP, an increase of more than 20 percent from November, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. About

1.2 million of these were in the 25 states (and the District of Columbia) already expanding Medicaid, and a little more than 1 million were in the 25 states that have not expanded coverage.

The CMS figures refer to the number of people who meet Medicaid eligibility rather than actual enrollment in the program, due to the troubled HealthCare.gov website, which is run by the federal government to serve health-care sign-ups in 36 states.